Day#337: My experience using Take a lot

January 12, 2020

Hey Researchers I recently went on the Take a lot site and decided to buy some products on the platform, for those that don’t know of Take a lot it a South African based ecommerce site that sells just about anything. They advertise profusely around Black Friday, and are really gaining traction for their fast delivery and great product range. When looking at the site some products are a little cheaper than the run of the mill retailers and pharmacies stocking the products. Something that really stood out for me though as frustrating was how when you search for something hardly enough options come up. This I have noticed with the Woolworths site as well.

This to me seems like an Information Architectural issue, one that can be understood by each of the brands mentioned above having customers come in and discussing and running exercises with customers to understand their preconceived mental models around content. The interesting situation that I ended up being in was looking for products and simply scrolling through lists and lists of products, if you searched by the brand of the product you would find the range, but if you searched by a sub category you would not find it at all. I think Take a lot does have an advantage whereby they are dominating the market in the local e Commerce space. If you are not in South Africa, you may be wondering why we even need our own eCommerce platform, and why consumers don’t just order internationally. South Africa is a very paranoid nation, the countries consumers have a reason for being that way though, and that is because we have so much crime and scams. There are a lot of people trying to con hard working individuals out of their money, I am on some local legal groups and it is almost daily that I see posts on people being conned. This happens from buying cars and other products, to being a victim of a fake breeder and purchasing an animal online. I really am not sure what is like in other countries not having travelled, but I do know that South Africans struggle with being a fully online consumer because of this. When I say Take a lot is dominating the market that is related to the reason, the small businesses don’t get a chance because the bigger business has a better reputation and consumers are not as worried about products being fake or not getting their products at all.

Take a lot has also been under fire with manulupating pricing, I noticed for Black Friday certain products being marked as 40% off, had an original price which was more expensive than a lot of other retailers. This allowed them to have the drastic 40% off sticker where as the product was potentially only 25 – 30% I do think that pricing is what it is, and companies use their own methods to make a sale.I have worked at retailers who had very different pricing to other competitors using the reason that they simply had different suppliers. Whatever the reason may be that in this era where it is easy for people to review pricing on all online competitors it is important to know what type of reputation you are creating for your brand. Happy researching until next time researchers!